The adventures of Trevor and Melissa, as he learns to cook and she learns to share the kitchen.

Category Archives: recipe

Normally when I go to the grocery store to buy something specific, I end up collecting lots of additional items on my way through the store which were not on my original list. Today, on a quick run for some diapers, I noticed that the items I was collecting were different than usual; heavy cream, whole milk, food coloring, and dry mustard. I found myself inventorying our kitchen as I walked though the isles, and spent a good couple minutes looking at various cleaning and polishing products for copper and stainless steel. The other day my wife and I were in the car, both sitting there quietly pondering as we often do. Melissa asked me, “What are you thinking about?” I replied “Cooking”. She sort of laughed at her expectations being met. But what can I say? I just get very focused on hobbies.

Anyways, now that I’d restocked my kitchen a bit, I couldn’t help but start looking through my wife’s preserve stash for something interesting to make ice cream with. Ah ha! Apple butter. I quickly threw this together and popped it in the fridge for later churning.

Initial taste tests indicate that my attempts to capture fresh green apple flavors during the mix-in stage were successful. We shall see how the texture comes out after a full day in the freezer.

Yeah so after half a day in the freezer secondary taste testing revealed little to no fresh apple taste in my opinion. To me it was more of an apple pie or roasted apple flavor. In a secondary note don’t use green food coloring for something that tastes like apple pie it sends conflicting signals to the brain. It’s like picking up your glass of orange juice and realizing it was actually milk.

Indeed, the flavor and color didn’t turn out to match up all that well, but it’s very fun looking!

I’ve tried to make ice cream a few times in the past month. I made apricot, chocolate fudge, and now strawberry.

On a side note this strawberry ice cream is the best ice cream he has made yet. Although the apricot was also very good. Not to say that I didn’t like the chocolate but it was very strong and you could not eat very much of it in one sitting.

So yeah, the first two ice creams I made were too syrupy, so this time I used the same Alton Brown Serious Vanilla recipe, only I backed off the cream a bit and used more milk – 2:1 ratio of whole milk to heavy cream to be exact. I also discovered recently how poorly calibrated our refrigerator and freezers were – all units were about 15 degrees too warm. With the now cooler temperatures, the ice cream really seemed to setup better. There was more air throughout and the texture was spot-on.

The chunks of strawberries I chose to mix-in at the end of the churning process however did not turn out. Besides the chunks being too large, they were mostly water so they froze up like ice cubes. Next time I will slice them very thin and dry them as much as possible before adding them in. Also, the berries I got at my local supermarket in December taste very bland anyways – I need to try this again in the summer.